“What? Let go of me you bastards! Please… I’m so sorry. I’ll give you everything I have.”
Unmoved by his desperate pleas, they continued to drag him in solemn silence down the tunnel toward Mictlantecuhtli’s altar room.
Wade struggled against his captors but it was useless. He could do nothing as they heaved him up to the altar and held his arms and legs down. He watched in terror as one of the men moved forward, his chanting now a jumble of incoherent words mixed together by his trance-like state. In his hand, the man raised the obsidian knife. The razor-sharp blade of polished volcanic glass flashed in the low green of the glow stick.
“Please… I don’t deserve this! Oh, God help me, please…”
And then the jagged obsidian struck his chest. He gasped as he felt the volcanic shards tear into his flesh, and screamed in terror as the chanting began, louder now. His mind raced with panic as the man raised the dagger for a second strike. Would he live to see his own heart held above him, still beating?
He closed his eyes and screamed in fear as the dagger blows rained down.
CHAPTER FORTY
Silvio Mendoza ran into the night, breathing hard and wincing at the pain of the bullet wound in his arm. He tripped over the roots of a chicozapote tree and stumbled forward, momentarily losing his grasp on the strange golden idol. He lay there for a moment, the sound of his heart pounding in his ears as the fighting back at the temple complex started to subside. Hawke must have won, he cursed.
But the bastard Wade was dead, and he had sent him on his way. God only knew what had happened to him in that hell pit. How deep did it go? Was it really the entrance to Mictlan? Mendoza preferred a simple life of extorting money and exerting power. Ideas like Mictlan and the god of the dead could fly away on the Tehuano wind as it ripped through the Chivela Pass. Such ideas were not for him.
And yet there was still this enigmatic little piece of the occult now in his possession. Maybe the fool Wade was onto something after all… he felt a shiver of fear run down his spine at the mere thought.
Gradually the noise of the battle behind him seemed to fade away as he studied the idol from his filthy, humid covert down in the roots and tangles of the rainforest. He felt like it was almost calling to him… whispering his name, but it was just in his mind. The moonlight shone dully on the idol as he stared at the mysterious face. He looked at it closer now.
It was a woman — for sure… a goddess of some kind, but nothing he recognized and certainly not Aztec, and yet there was something approximating Aztec pictograms on its back and side. Either side of her head was the strangest headdress he had ever seen — it looked almost like she had a wheel on either side of her head, and it was covered in intricate carvings. It was bewitching, beguiling… he couldn’t take his eyes off her and her imperious, almost inhuman face.
What value must an object as precious as this hold..? His avaricious mind raced with an almost uncontainable delight as he thought about what such wealth could bring him… his freedom from the Americans and a powerful new cartel. It was almost too good to be true, but Wade had been certain that any treasure they found in Mictlan was sure to be priceless.
He picked the idol back up and slipped it in his jacket pocket. Whoever she was, she was all he had now. Wade had died horribly back in the complex — he could still hear the screams as the blood pumped from his chest — and the ECHO team had gunned down Garza and the others. But what had happened in America?
He called Aurora from the dank silence of his jungle hole and it didn’t take her long to explain about the failure to deliver Armageddon to the gabachos in California. His brother was dead, at the hands of ECHO once again, and Aurora was a fugitive on the run.
Mendoza snapped the phone shut without a word to her. “I will live to fight another day,” he said, cursing his failure. “And for my brother, you will pay with your lives.”
Then he scrambled away into the thick, sultry jungle.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
As the dust settled over the temple complex, Lea wound a bandage around the wound in Hawke’s side. As she worked, he watched Gonzalez’s men round up the last surviving members of Wade’s fanatical cult from the jungle around the complex, including a handful of the serpientes. They cuffed them ready for the journey back to civilization.
“Any sign of Mendoza?” he asked.
Sergeant Gonzalez shook his head. “He’s not among the dead we’ve searched either, but my men are still looking.”
Hawke nodded. “He’s long gone,” he said, and the sergeant tossed him a bottle.
“Take this,” said Gonzalez, lighting a cigarette. “You earned it.”
It was a bottle of tequila, and Hawke agreed they’d earned it. He tensed under the bandage and the pain of the obsidian blade wound coursed through his body.
Everywhere he looked he saw death and destruction. Black smoke from the fires started by the mortars bloomed up into a twilight sky now lit by the flames from the burning complex. Corpses of the dead lay strewn across the battle field, face-down on the ground and twisted inside the mangled wreckage of Wade’s blown-up chopper.
When it came to death, the jungle worked fast: the stench of the dead was already in the air. Hawke shook his head in disbelief. He guessed Mictlantecuhtli had gotten his sacrifices after all, but Silvio Mendoza wasn’t one of them. The cartel boss had escaped into the jungle with the mysterious golden idol and that couldn’t be allowed to pass. Worse than that, he knew he had to pass on to the others the revelation about Matheson being controlled by this mysterious Oracle. Finishing Wade’s lunatic Aztec prophecy had been a non-stop lightning ride, and he hadn’t had a single chance to discuss Matheson’s dying words with his friends.
Amidst the smoking ruins, Lea was now talking with some of the Mexican Special Forces. She looked tired, but still strong. He hadn’t spoken to her about it, but sometimes he wondered if they should get hitched… then visions of Matheson sprawled out dead in his study rose in his mind and he let the thought fly away. It was too soon after Liz.
Killing Matheson had helped to lay her to rest in his mind, but it was only half the job. Alfredo Lazaro, the Spider, was still out there somewhere, and he too would pay the ultimate price for his actions that day in Vietnam. But for now at least, Matheson’s death had eased some of the anguish he’d felt since that day.
As Ryan and Maria were hugging in a part of the complex they thought was out of sight, Lea took a call and meandered over to Hawke. “That was Rich,” she said. “The bomb is deactivated and Jorge Mendoza and the rest of the cult members are dead.”
“Juana Diaz?”
“In custody.”
“What about Aurora Soto?”
“Dropped off the radar, which is a worry… the crazy bitch.”
Hawke nodded. It was more than a worry. That meant both Silvio Mendoza and Aurora Soto, the insane lovers, were both free and in possession of what could easily be the world’s most important artefact.
They slowly congregated back at the base of the main pyramid. Reaper twisted the lid off the bottle of tequila and took a long gulp, wiping the spirit from his lips. “That’s the medicine I need,” he said with a happy sigh. “Oué vraiment, mes amis!”
“But firewater’s a dangerous medicine, Reap,” Lea said, taking the bottle.
“When do we get to see the treasure again?” Ryan asked.
Hawke looked at him like he was crazy. He had forgotten about the treasure, but now it all came flooding back. Despite the carnage all around them, they were sitting on top of one of the greatest discoveries in archaeological history — the Noche Triste treasure — an incalculable quantity of silver and gold bullion taken from Moctezuma by the Spanish but as they now knew, taken back again and hidden in the deepest jungle. This was one hoard the Caribbean pirates never even had a chance to seize.